They're both better than Wes Clark though, who is the #1 friend of the anti-vilsack MySpace profile. Not very classy, general!

As Chris notes, the Iowa Senate version of the bill provides for cost-of-living adjustments, which would more or less negate the need for future minimum wage increases. This is an obviously good idea, but I doubt that it will end up happening.

Like abortion for conservatives, the minimum wage is a gift that keeps on giving for Democrats. Once every decade we get a really easy issue that also makes Republicans look bad. If we attached an automatic adjustment, the issue would be off the table forever. Imagine if Social Security were set up to have no cost-of-living increases, and the only reason they got bumped every now and then was that Democrats voted on party line to increase it - we'd never lose any elections.

Still, linking the minimum wage to inflation is good policy and I support it. I hope our legislatures will too.

As far as I know though, only John Edwards and John Kerry have admitted that voting for war in the first place was a mistake. There is a big difference between "Well geez things sure turned out bad so of course in retrospect it was a bad idea" camp and the "It was a bad idea in the first place and we should have known it then" camp. Considering that most Democratic activists were against the war from the start, it's going to take more than just acknowledging that Iraq is a shitshow now to win our support.

It's also interesting to note that no Republican current or former Presidential candidate would have changed their mind. I'll bet some of them will come around by 2008, though!

Also, Maria Comella will be the Giuliani exploratory committee's director for regional media. She has experience in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Most recently, Comella served as comm. dir for Ex-Rep. Jim Nussle's IA GOV campaign. In '04, she was the NH comm. dir for the Bush-Cheney re-election effort. She's worked for Gov. George Pataki and the Winston Group and even, at her young age, has Capitol Hill experience.

So basically she worked on a badly losing campaign in Iowa that was never able to put together a real message, and before that did communications for the only state in the entire country that voted for Bush in 2000 and then against him in 2004. And as for their description of her as "a grade A professional," remember this story?

At this point in the 2004 election cycle, 2000 vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman was running ahead in public opinion polls, but Lieberman dropped out of the race a few months before the Iowa Caucuses because he wasn't getting the backing of hard-core party activists who prove crucial in early states like Iowa.

ARG is based out of New Hampshire, and has done work for Republican candidates before. As recently as 2004 they refused to name who was paying for their polling; I don't know if they have been asked about this latest effort. One of my friends in New Hampshire's first words about them were "something something Republican hacks."

They don't list any past results on their website, which is a pretty good sign that they aren't all that proud of them. In 2004 they did a lot of state polling, and seemed to be less accurate than average, ranking in the lower half for both overall and battleground polling according to Real Clear Politics. Their bread and butter polling of the New Hampshire primary has been almost hilariously bad - They got the winner wrong in 1996 and 2000, and were off by twenty points in the McCain/Bush race.

And for good measure, they aren't all that great in Democratic primaries either.

So ARG sucks and their polling is crap. Just puttin' it out there.